Michelle Works Out Loud – A Tool to Capture & Communicate What You Know

Today’s daily dispatch is about a tool I use to help me record and communicate things I know. It’s called a pink sheet. I was introduced to pink sheets in a business school program that I’m currently undertaking. After several months of using them I’ve finally gotten the hang of the template and am finding it a useful way to capture my body of knowledge in a subject area and figure out how to communicate it in a more rounded way.

The template is shown on the left. The idea is to convey a single key point on one page in a range of ways.

Moving vertically through the template from top to bottom the point is presented from big picture through to detail as follows:

Context – big picture, what’s it about

Concept – what does it mean, explained using a brief statement followed by a short explanation of the statement

Content – detail and specifics that illustrate the point

Moving horizontally, left and right brain thinking are covered as follows:

Left – studies, statistics and a model

Right – metaphor and stories

Here is a completed template to illustrate how the elements come together. You can take a closer look at a PDF version of this pink sheet. Note that it’s not ‘perfect’ – it’s a working document that can be used as source content for a range of purposes. As I use the material I can continue to refine and improve it. When I find new research or a better metaphor for instance I can add it to a pink sheet.

I can also ‘layer’ pink sheets, going deeper into a specific element of a high level pink sheet. For example, there are several different elements in the model on this sample pink sheet. For each of these elements one or more further pink sheets can be created to drill down into these elements. Over time a set of interconnected sheets is built up.

Another very elegant aspect of pink sheets is that I can combine different sets of pink sheets in a subject area as required to create a presentation, a workshop, a paper, even a mentoring program or, in time, a book. It becomes very efficient to repackage what I know in a range of formats and communicate it. All in all, a very useful tool.

ooh, this is nice! A colleague has been working on a set of ‘just enough’ documents, each one describing a tool, technique or idea that we want to share with other workgroups in our organisation. The pink sheet looks like a useful way to capture and develop the underlying concepts for this. Thanks 🙂